Saturday, August 19, 2006

Writing and Rain

I'm not sure what to start out with today. There are two things of equal prominence in my mind--one is writing related, one isn't. Maybe, since I've spent so much time talking about the writing lately, I'll start with the other.

It didn't rain yesterday! I know, you're thinking, oh, hell, she's going to talk about the weather again. Kind of, but only in relation to watering my darn sod. (You can skip down to the writing stuff if that's what you're interested in. I do go on for a little bit about my yard and the rain.) You see, I was counting on the rain to hit the spots I know I'm missing as I try to water my brand new lawn. It's difficult to tell what's wet enough to be good watering and what's damp, but still needs water. Besides, my shoes get all wet, I get wet as the sprinkler hits me and it's just plain a PITA. I have brand new appreciation of my dad doing this for me for six days. Clearly, I need to get him a gift for all that work.

So all the weather geeks have been swearing up and down for days that we'd have rain on Friday. I was counting on this rain. The first storm was huge and it was headed right for us. Hours of rain. I sighed in bliss. No need to water.

It dropped south and missed us entirely. Iowa stole our rain.

But there was another storm off in North Dakota and that's the one the weather people said we'd get. It's not as wide and as wet as the first storm, but it was still rain. It would be here around midnight. Okay, so I water on Friday and I can take Saturday off. I can deal with that, plus Saturday will be a heavy duty writing day anyway, so if I don't have to waste precious time moving sprinklers around, this can only be good.

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning is look out the window. It didn't look very wet out there. Heck, it didn't even look damp. My heart sank. Maybe, I thought hopefully, it rained and quit early enough that it dried up already. Hey, you have to be an optimist to be a writer! All that rejection--even once you're published--takes someone who eternally believes that the sun is around the corner.

I turn on the television and find a local station showing the weather. My beautiful rain storm went north of the Twin Cities. Duluth stole our rain!

The rest of the forecast is for dry, sunny weather. :-( So I'll be out every day hauling sprinklers and hoses around.

Okay, for those who've waded their way through my rain/yard story, here's the writing stuff I promised.

I received my revisions for the novella yesterday and I have two weeks to get them done. The timing isn't the absolute worst it could be. It's only pretty bad. I really was going to town on my proposal. The arc overview was done. The synopsis was done. And I was writing story at a pretty good clip. I wanted to finish it this weekend, at least the first draft of the proposal pages, and mail it to my agent next week some time.

This leaves me with a dilemma--do I keep writing the proposal this weekend and start on the revisions on Monday? Or do I drop everything and work on revisions now?

The revisions aren't huge ones, but they could end up being time consuming because of the tweaking I'd need to do throughout the story. They're also going to require writing a couple of new scenes and adding to several others.

On the other hand, if I drop the proposal and work on revisions to the novella, I'll be delayed two weeks. I also expect revisions on my novel any day, so that could mean more than a two week delay. We could be talking deep into September before I'd be able to pick up Flare's story again. By then, my connection to the characters and story would be cold, and even with my notes, I wouldn't be 100% sure exactly what I'd meant to do next.

I'm leaning toward writing my butt off this weekend on Flare and then moving on to the novella on Monday whether I have the proposal done or not.

But then I think, wow, what if I get revisions for Ryne and Deke and the deadline is tight on that. I'll be sorry then if I spent 2 days working on the proposal when I could have gotten stuff done on the novella.

In other words, I'm completely torn. What would you work on if you were in my place?